US District Judge Janet Hall set 2 June as the start date, and also ruled that Bristol may share information with lawyers for other antitrust cases pending against Microsoft – one brought by the US Department of Justice and 19 states, and another by Caldera, another software company.

"I think it strengthens [everybody's] case against Microsoft, because now it's like three different people working together," said Marybeth McGuire, spokeswoman for Bristol, which is based in Danbury, Connecticut.

The Bristol suit, filed in a US District Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut on 18 August, 1998, alleges that Microsoft stifled competition by controlling access to its Windows NT source code – a charge that Microsoft has hotly disputed.

Bristol is one of several companies alleging that Microsoft (MSFT) used the market share of its Windows operating system to cow PC makers to do its bidding and to quickly snuff out innovative technologies created by rivals. In addition to the landmark antitrust case brought on by the Department of Justice, Microsoft is fighting an antitrust case filed by Caldera, a vendor of operating systems that compete with MS-DOS.

The potential sharing of information among anti-Microsoft litigants is not yet reciprocal, but Bristol expects that the judges in the two other cases will agree with Hall.

"We're hoping that the judges from those cases are going to feel the same way – they were waiting for our judge to rule on that," McGuire said. "So anything that pertains to Bristol, they can give it to us – documents, emails, testimony."

"Anything we find pertaining to either the Caldera or the US case that we think would be of interest to them, we now have the right to give them," McGuire said.

Hall said in her written ruling last Friday: "The parties appear to have essentially complied with the pretrial order, and the case should be ready for trial in early June."

The pretrial order gave each side a list of depositions to be done and documents to be produced in order for the trial to go ahead on time.

Jury selection will start on 20 May.

"This is a case of great importance to the entire computer industry," said Patrick Lynch, lead attorney for Bristol. "Our case is extremely important to the future of competition in the computer industry."

The Bristol trial is expected to last six to eight weeks, and it stands to be the first of the Microsoft antitrust cases to receive a ruling.

Closely held Bristol, which had 1998 revenues of US$8 million compared to Microsoft's $14.5 billion, makes a product called Wind/U, which acts as a bridge between developers writing software for Windows and Unix.

Microsoft has argued that Bristol's claims are without merit, and that Bristol is merely using the courts to obtain more favorable licensing terms for Microsoft source code.